The Manna and Miriam's Well

A month after leaving Egypt the food ran out and the people complained: in Egypt we sat by pots of meat and ate bread to the full. The answer was the manna, fine as frost on the ground, falling every morning six days a week. The rules were strict and strange: gather exactly one omer per person, leave nothing for the next day—what was left bred worms; on Friday gather a double portion, which miraculously kept for the Sabbath; on the Sabbath none fell. Whoever gathered more found he had no more than the one who gathered little. For forty years the people lived without stores, fields or markets. Water came from a rock, and tradition speaks of Miriam's well, a spring that travelled with the camp in the merit of the prophetess; when she died the water stopped. A jar of manna was kept in the Tabernacle as a reminder for later generations.

Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.